Visitor Response: Zander Reyna

It was really fascinating to learn and hear about his take on 3D graphics, facial tracking/recognition technology, and the future. Especially the idea of the Uncanny Valley, and how the graphics of many games today are getting close to being indistinguishable from reality. When he showed us that video of a cave/canyon render from PS5's Unreal Engine (I believe?) that was made up of billions of triangles and legitimately looked like it was shot in real-life with a camera, I was so blown away. It genuinely made me excited for the future of gaming, but also made me wonder how financially accessible the technology capable of running these games will be. Will only thousand dollar gaming PCs/consoles be able to deliver these displays, or will the most basic, bare minimum "work" computers be able to run these games/programs eventually too? Will having an "uncanny" level of graphics become the norm?

I also really liked how he brought up willrobotstakemyjob.com, because the whole idea of face tracking in gaming really made me wonder about the career of acting. When I went on the site, most of the creative careers like artists, graphic designers, etc, had a really low (almost no) chance of being taken by robots, but when I looked up actors, the rating was higher than expected (I think artists were like 0-10%, but actors were 30% of being taken by robots). This surprised me because I thought that with the popularity of facial tracking in gaming to create the character expressions, that this would actually help create more acting jobs. I immediately thought of games like Until Dawn (which featured some celebrities/film actors as cast) and Detroit: Become Human where the characters were modeled after their (voice) actors, and were essentially the digital representation of the actor, down to bone structure and the smallest freckles. In this sense, I think we might see more traditional actors and celebrities moving to the gaming world. But then I realized this projected future is only likely under the assumption that we will continue using facial tracking technology. If we theoretically perfected AI, so that the AI could create extremely detailed 3D models with facial expressions and all (without a human model) and could speak with the natural inflections of a human, then we really wouldn't need actors at all... It's kind of crazy to think about. Zander's presentation really made me think about a LOT; I enjoyed it.